Has Legislative Television Changed Legislator Behavior?: C-SPAN2 and the Frequency of Senate Filibustering

Franklin Mixon, M Troy Gibson and Kamal Upadhyaya

Public Choice, 2003, vol. 115, issue 1-2, 139-62

Abstract: Using data from 1959-98, this study examines the impact of legislative television (C-SPAN2) on the number of filibusters in the United States Senate. As previous work has suggested, the institutional rules of the federal legislative branch of government in the U.S. often allow for political grandstanding and posturing, and these activities are enhanced with the presence of television cameras on the legislative floor. Like those previous studies, the present work builds a theoretical model wherein political services are considered search/experience goods, and service providers (federal legislators) are expected utility maximizers who are concerned with promoting their policy preferences and their re-election prospects. Poisson model estimates suggest that the presence of legislative television has worked to increase the filibuster count in the Senate. As a result, such posturing and positioning on the issues by incumbents (in front of television cameras) is costly for challengers to replicate and likely contributes to lower turnover rates in the legislative branch. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:115:y:2003:i:1-2:p:139-62

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().